#chris-eppstein

position:unique

Joining LinkedIn

On June 26th, 2008 I started porting the Blueprint CSS framework to a
new-fangled stylesheet syntax called Sass. That work eventually became
Compass and led to me joining the Sass core team along side Natalie
Weizenbaum. In our precious free time, Natalie and I managed to
build a language and an ecosystem of which we are incredibly proud. Sass
has changed the course of web development. It has inspired over a dozen CSS
preprocessors, at least two of which have gone on to become incredibly
popular in their own right. Sass has been integrated into so many web
development tools that I have lost count now. I was pretty sure that
Sass was “mainstream” when the Google Chrome team recently contributed
sourcemap support so that Sass developers could more easily interact
with Chrome’s development tools. Four years ago, people questioned
whether a preprocessor was a necessary tool for their project. Now,
they debate which one they will use.

By all rights, Sass and Compass have accomplished great things. If
Natalie or I decided to stop working on these projects, moving on to new
things, no one would think less of us. In fact, over the past six
months, I have been pondering this exact question. Both my job at
Caring.com and needs of Sass & Compass have grown to a point where I can
no longer adequately perform the duties required of them while also
spending the quality time I desire with my amazing wife and daughter.
Something had to give. As a result, for the last year or so I have
scaled back my public speaking and work on open source so that I could
focus on providing for my family both emotionally and financially.

Despite all our success, Sass and Compass are still not what we imagine
they could be. I have not been able to escape the nagging feeling that
the most important work that I could do in an ongoing way was in the web
development community. I’ve been very sad that I have been letting the
users of Sass and Compass down lately. However, it occurred to me
(thanks in part to the prompting of Chris Coyier) that if I
could find a company willing to support Sass & Compass development by
hiring me, I could go back to doing the thing that I love: helping make
front-end web development easier, and styling websites more awesome.

When I visited LinkedIn in February with Krys Taylor to speak
about our styleguide development process I met a team
of engineers doing amazing things with Sass and Compass. LinkedIn has
over 1,100 Sass files (230k lines of SCSS) and over 90 web developers
writing Sass every day. I asked if they would hire me to maintain Sass &
Compass, as well as help them with their front-end architecture and
developer relations. Basically, I asked LinkedIn for my dream job, and
they agreed that it was an excellent idea. So I will start working there
on May 13th.

That said, the decision to leave Caring.com was not an easy one. For six
years, I had the honor of working with some of the most talented
people I have ever worked with. As the first employee, I have given my
all to the creation of the company and to the mission of helping
millions of caregivers get though their tough times. Building a company is
difficult and often ends in failure. Today, Caring.com has a viable
business model, firm technological foundations, and a first class team.
I’m certain they will succeed spectacularly with or without me – which
makes me an extremely proud entrepreneur.

TL;DR I will be joining the amazing engineering team at LinkedIn on
May 13th where one of my responsibilities will be to maintain Sass &
Compass. I couldn’t be more thrilled.

About Me

I am an open source hacker and stylesheet architect at LinkedIn.
I live in San Jose, California with my wife and daughter.

Open Source

I'm the creator of Compass, a stylesheet authoring framework
and I'm on the core team of
Sass — the stylesheet syntax upon which Compass is built.
I maintain about a dozen less well known ruby libraries and rails plugins on
github,
and am an active contributor of patches to the many open source projects that I use.